SCIENCE MAN HAS THE CURE

Science Man's 2022 full-length, Nines Mecca, bit me. The record chomped down on my arm like a rabid animal, just smart enough to know I owed it a meal, and then it just sort of hung there in my flesh after its first taste. Singer John Toohill's scathing vocals on the opener, "Poach The Mind's Eye" were like messages scrawled on the crumbling drywall of abandoned homes: "In the future I will find a cure for the future!" Intrigued, I sat down to witness the 10 consecutive music videos for each track on the album, strung together to Frankenstein together a DIY horror short, and I was sold.

NINES MECCA on Youtube

The Nines Mecca experience is a lot closer to the classic syncing of The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon, albeit much more bleak and gory. The blistering, unrelenting execution of the string of music videos is better compared to pairing the '81 The Evil Dead with Rudimentary Peni's Death Church. You're not in Kansas anymore. You've been pulled by the ankles into Science Man's blood-splattered audiovisual playground. The campy visuals create a lore that only needs tidbits of your interpretation between pummeling bursts of cursed imagery, shoving measured flavors of dark fantasy and sci-fi horror into your cranium. It's a balance as unforgiving and dystopian as the frigid winters in Buffalo, NY, where this record was assembled.

When I say this Science Man is hardcore punk, I'm not wasting a word adding the punk suffix. Nothing is more punk than doing more with less, and that's Science Man's whole brand. DIY short films and a self-run label aside, Nines Mecca showcases a masterful restraint on the musical side too. Especially on the drums, willfully not pushing every song into metal breakdown territory with constant double-kick-drumming and electing to pummel the kit twice as hard at the same speed instead really makes this record stand a head above the rest. 

The tones of Nines Mecca are just dulcet enough to still technically be garage, but chuggy enough to pair in with more conventionally heavy bands nicely. "Super Charger" especially invokes good up-the-middle, two-steppable nastiness. (Which is to say it makes people want to hit stuff.) "Adventure Spit" follows, touting a little noise-punk respite from the album's peak brutality, before B-side tracks like "No Quarter For The Brute" chug back into focus like a bull in a china shop with red walls. By the time you've registered the record is over, the closer has probably looped back into the opening track again.

MINCE'S CANE on Youtube

Then, this spring, the raving prophets from Buffalo hit again. Faster, meaner and grimier than before. The songs on Mince's Cane are even shorter, more sporadic and far more no-fi than their predecessor. Rather than a cane, the loose story of this record centers on a cube. A black box, alongside abstract, bleak gore that's cranked to eleven nonstop across the second careening short film's even noisier bites. The cube tears apart everything in its path, and of course, Science Man follows suit just like they did on Nines Mecca. Just like they will on the next one, if I know anything about the frenzied work ethic of DIY bands this cool.